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Cup Cake
One-half cup butter, one cup of sugar, two cups of flour, twothirds cup of milk, two eggs, two teaspoons of baking powder, salt, and flavoring.
— Mrs. Walton Van Loan
A bare ingredient list in the older style: the cook of 1900 was assumed to know the creaming method and to judge her own oven. The proportions are sound and translate directly.
- Method, since none is givenCream the softened butter with the sugar until pale, beat in the eggs one at a time, then add the flour sifted with the baking powder and salt alternately with the milk. Finish with the flavoring and do not beat once the flour is in.
- Oven and timeBake at 350F. An 8-inch square or a single 8-inch round takes 30 to 35 minutes; a small loaf pan closer to 45. Test with a skewer in the center.
- "Flavoring"Household shorthand for whatever extract was in the cupboard — usually vanilla, lemon, or rose, sometimes grated nutmeg. Use 1 teaspoon of vanilla or lemon extract, or half a teaspoon of nutmeg.
- SaltProbably left unquantified as a pinch taken between the fingers. Use 1/4 teaspoon with unsalted butter, and omit or halve it if your butter is salted.
- Baking powderTwo teaspoons to two cups of flour is still standard. Powders of this period were generally single-acting, so the batter was not meant to stand; get it into the oven promptly.
- CupsThe measures are 8 fl oz cups, and the flour would have been spooned into the cup rather than packed. Two cups is roughly 250 g; two-thirds cup of milk is about 160 ml.
- YieldAbout 8 to 10 slices from a single layer, or 12 standard muffin-tin cakes at 350F for 18 to 20 minutes.
Despite the name, this is not a cupcake in the modern sense of a small iced cake in a paper case — it is a cake measured in cups. Many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American cooks worked without reliable scales, and "cup cake" named a formula you could remember by ratio, the best-known being the 1-2-3-4 cake: one cup butter, two of sugar, three of flour, four eggs. Mrs. Van Loan's version is a smaller, plainer household variant, stretched with milk and lifted with baking powder rather than the beaten eggs and pearlash of earlier decades. It is typical of what contributors sent to community collections: the everyday cake they actually baked, trusting readers to know the rest.